World News Quick Take

Agencies

CHINA

Woman kills, cooks husband

A woman in eastern China murdered her husband and boiled the corpse to cover her tracks after he abused her and her daughter, a report said yesterday. The woman drugged the man, her second husband, and tortured him for three days in June by withholding food and water and beating him, causing his death, said a report on government-backed news portal Anhui News. She then dismembered the corpse with a saw and boiled the parts in a pressure cooker to hide the evidence, the report said. It did not detail how she disposed of the cooked flesh afterwards. The psychological burden of the crime proved too much for her to bear, causing her to turn herself into police, the report said.

SPAIN

Activists nab school supplies

A Robin Hood-style band of left-wing activists openly stole cart-loads of school supplies from a supermarket on Friday, promising to distribute them to needy children. After alerting media, more than 200 members of the Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores (Andalusian Union of Workers) emerged from a Carrefour supermarket in Seville pushing about 10 shopping carts brimming with exercise books, pens, felt-tips and dictionaries. They loaded the back-to-school supplies into vans and left. Spain’s Interior Ministry vowed to identify and detain members of the union who “robbed” the supermarket so as to bring them to justice. “The Interior Ministry will act severely and firmly in this matter,” a ministry spokesman said. The “expropriated” school materials this time would be given to needy families in the next few days, the union said in a statement.

KENYA

Commission boss gets head

A human head and two hands have been sent to the nation’s police commission chief, viewed as a grim warning against his efforts to reform the force, officers said on Friday. A box containing the body parts was left outside the headquarters of the National Police Service Commission in Nairobi on Thursday, city police chief Benson Kibui said. Included was a threat for the chief of the largely civilian police oversight body, Johnston Kavuludi, who was appointed last year and is trying to push through reforms. “Kavuludi, you are next,” a note with the head read. Comprehensive police reforms were introduced in 2011 aimed at stopping violations committed by police during post-election violence in 2007 and 2008, but implementation has been blocked. The reforms transfer some powers from the police chief to the commission, including responsibility for recruitment and discipline of police officers.

VATICAN

First papal ‘selfie’ goes viral

Pope Francis has broken protocol once again, appearing with a puzzled look on his face in a “selfie” photo taken with a group of teenagers visiting the Vatican. The picture appeared on the Facebook page of one of the youngsters, who used it as his profile picture, and was going viral on social media yesterday. The picture comes in the same week that the Oxford English Dictionary included the word “selfie” to denote a self-taken photograph on a smartphone. The young believers were part of a church group from northern Italy who met with the pope on Wednesday and were seen going up to him afterwards to take their photo. “There is no marketing behind these actions. The pope clearly likes being with people while his predecessor liked being with books,” said Beppe Severgnini, columnist for the Corriere della Sera daily.